bug#51405: Set default font on Windows to Consolas-11

[Vince Salvino <salvino@coderedcorp.com>]

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Courier New generally looks terrible on modern screens, as it has been neglected for decades since its original digitization for use with 640x480 CRT screens in the early 90s. Many of the character glyphs are only 1 pixel wide and look like hairlines on an LCD screen.

To address this, Windows Vista and later ship with Consolas, the default monospaced font used in Notepad, CMD (terminal), and other built-in programs. It is also used by default in nearly every other text/code editor, web browser, and terminal program when requesting a monospace font. Personally speaking, it is magnitudes more legible and easier to read. Consolas looks similar to DejaVu Mono, which is generally the default in GNU systems. 

This patch changes the default font in MS-Windows to Consolas-11. It will still fall back to the previous default (Courier New-10) on older systems where the font is not available. I want to be clear that this is not a change for the sake of choosing a fashionable font... Consolas has been the default monospace font in Windows for 15 years!


Vince Salvino


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From 58ec236a72b883455e5112d1aafdafff6ab8f32f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Vince Salvino <salvino@coderedcorp.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2021 02:11:06 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] Set default font on Windows to Consolas-11

---
 src/w32fns.c | 3 ++-
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/src/w32fns.c b/src/w32fns.c
index 14d1154a2b..141a9ed0a9 100644
--- a/src/w32fns.c
+++ b/src/w32fns.c
@@ -5670,7 +5670,8 @@ w32_default_font_parameter (struct frame *f, Lisp_Object parms)
     {
       int i;
       static const char *names[]
-	= { "Courier New-10",
+	= { "Consolas-11",
+	    "Courier New-10",
 	    "-*-Courier-normal-r-*-*-13-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1",
 	    "-*-Fixedsys-normal-r-*-*-12-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1",
 	    "Fixedsys",
-- 
2.33.0.windows.2